The dark side of working out loud

When organisations engage us to deliver communication and collaboration programmes, one of the key benefits they’re looking for is to enable their organisations to better Work Out Loud.

That is, to purposefully make your work visible so that it can be committed to corporate memory, built on, shared and learned from.

For individuals, Working Out Loud (or WOL for short) can help to build relationships, improve skills and raise profiles. For companies, it can mean more work is committed to corporate memory (rather than hidden in inboxes and lost when people move on), boost engagement, and creates greater opportunities for serendipity.

But what about the potential negative impacts? In our latest post we’re looking at the darker side of working out loud.

The wonder of WOL

Platforms like Teams, Workplace and Slack make working out loud easier to do at scale, while the growth in flexible and remote working and shortening of average length of employment makes this practice increasingly valuable. But we rarely talk about the less positive impacts this practice can have.

In startups, working out loud can be business critical. It can improve company communication, enable people to juggle multiple roles and workloads, and in periods of rapid growth allow new starters to quickly access knowledge, people and resources.

And there are some great examples of this. At UK challenger bank Monzo, Slack has been built into their ways of working right from the start. Monzonauts are encouraged to be as open as is appropriate about their work, so that as they grow (which they are, and fast) new colleagues are able to access the bank’s intellectual capital and corporate memory quickly. They’ve simply never developed an “email habit”. Slack’s helped them to build the open and collaborative culture that makes them a sought after place to work – and helped to build a trusted consumer brand too.

Older, legacy organisations have long sought to do the same, with varying degrees of success. In 2011 the CEO of IT giant Atos pledged to end the use of internal email by 2014. Social collaboration, they found, improved the sharing of knowledge across the enterprise, made it easier to locate subject matter experts, and most importantly, allowed for more efficient collaboration. Atos never hit their zero-email target, but they made some impressive inroads — and saw their profits rise at the same time.

Just this week, TD Ameritrade announced it’s seen a 30% decrease in email use since they rolled out Slack. The financial brokerage firm hopes to to bolster communication and cut down on email annoyances by shifting information-sharing and conversations from email to public channels.

The whoa! of WOL

But while WOL can amplify positive behaviours, the same is also true in reverse; the tools and practices associated with working out loud can enable and magnify toxic behaviours too.

An exposé in The Verge on direct-to-customer luggage brand Away highlighted the danger of working out loud combined with bad management practices.

Founded in 2015, the hipster suitcase brand made working out loud on Slack the core of its internal communications infrastructure, with emails and direct messages strongly discouraged

In a statement to the Verge, CEO Steph Korey said:

“Over the course of our careers, [co-founder] Jen and I observed situations where women and underrepresented groups were often excluded from key emails or meetings. Slack affords levels of inclusion and transparency email simply doesn’t. With email the original author gets to pick who is included in the conversation and whose voices won’t be heard. That’s not the company we want.”

While admirable in principle, critics claim this commitment to transparency was in practice used to micromanage and exert control, with projects criticised in public channels and employees reprimanded for not answering messages immediately — even late at night and on weekends.

The series of leaked Slack messages suggested a gulf between between the inclusive and wholesome image of the premium bag brand and the reality of working at Away.

On the one hand, positioning Slack at the centre of their company created a digital panopticon at Away where employees felt surveilled and coerced. On the other, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and creating a long-term record of management behaviour is one way of rooting it out (albeit via the expensive and embarrassing route of negative media coverage and potential employee lawsuits).

Away is not alone in seeing their dirty laundry from Slack hit the media. Earlier this year fintech bad boy Revolut hit the headlines when their CEO’s clumsy attempts at motivating staff of the company Slack were leaked to Wired.

Working Out Loud can deliver huge benefits, but if your company culture is a poor one it will quickly – and potentially publicly – bring this into sharp focus.

Corporate boon, corporate risk

We know from our work that making a success of social collaboration is only partly about tech. It’s mostly about having the right skills, processes and – most importantly – culture. And it needs effective communication around platform purpose and appropriate use.

• Skills: People need to know their way around collaboration tools and platforms, but they also need to learn how to effectively collaborate in a way that adds value rather than noise
• Processes: WOL shouldn’t be a chore or an additional burden on top of the day job. Working collaboratively, sharing ideas and work-in-progress needs to be built into how people get things done. But at the same time, WOL should never be universal across an organisation. It’s legitimate and ethical to hide some dirty laundry. HR issues should not be conducted in a public arena.
• Communication: People need to understand the benefits of WOL for the organisation and to them personally
• Leadership: Platforms like Slack, Workplace and Teams can allow great leaders to be more visible, to show not tell, and to listen to the organisation. But these tools hold a magnifying mirror up to poor management behaviours, creating legal and reputational risks
• Culture: People need to feel comfortable sharing and collaborating. They need to see others – in particular their own line manager – doing it to feel psychologically safe doing the same

Enterprise communication is not the Field of Dreams; it’s not simply a case of ‘if you build it, they will come”. Workplace communities act as both a reflector of, and a contributor to, the corporate culture. The technology alone is not the saviour; if there’s a poisonous corporate culture, what you see on Slack will merely reflect this.

These communities need effective long-term management to ensure that positive behaviours are rewarded and inappropriate behaviours are corrected.

Whether you’re flogging suitcases or providing banking services, abusing your employees in public is bad business, bad ethics and bad PR – and when conducted on a platform such as Slack, your chances of getting away with it are small.

(Fun fact! Slack is an acronym  that would make Orwell proud and your risk team weep: Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge)

While suitcase-selling startups may not have the luxury of a collaboration strategy, as firms scale the risks of not aligning your tools with capability, leadership, culture and communication are simply too great to ignore.

If you want to talk to us about your collaboration strategy, processes and culture, book a free consultation call.